DONNE AND LOVE POETRY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
I have seen an old history of literature in which the respective claims of Shelley and Mrs Hemans to be the greatest lyrist of the nineteenth century were seriously weighed; and Donne, who was so inconsiderable fifty years ago, seems at the moment to rank among our greatest poets.
If there were no middle state between absolute certainty and what Mr Kellett calls the whirligig of taste,1 these fluctuations would make us throw up criticism in despair. But where it is impossible to go quite straight we may yet resolve to reel as little as we can. Such phenomena as the present popularity of Donne or the growing unpopularity of Milton are not to be deplored; they are rather to be explained. It is not impossible to see why Donne’s poetry should be overrated in the twentieth and underrated in the eighteenth century; and in so far as we detect these temporary disturbing factors and explain the varying appearances of the object by the varying positions of the observers, we shall come appreciably nearer to a glimpse of Donne simpliciter. I shall concern myself in what follows chiefly with his love poetry.
In style this poetry is primarily a development of one of the two styles which we find in the work of Donne’s immediate predecessors. One of these is the mellifluous, luxurious, ‘builded rhyme’, as in Spenser’s Amoretti: the other is the abrupt, familiar, and consciously ‘manly’ style in which nearly all Wyatt’s lyrics are written. Most of the better poets make use of both, and in Astrophil and Stella much of Sidney’s success depends on deliberate contrast between such poetry as
Nor of that golden sea, whose waves in curles are brok’n2
and such poetry as
He cannot love: no, no, let him alone.3
But Wyatt remains, if not the finest, yet much the purest example of the plainer manner, and in reading his songs, with their conversational openings, their surly (not to say sulky) defiances, and their lack of obviously poetic ornament, I find myself again and again reminded of Donne. But of course he is a Donne with most of the genius left out. Indeed, the first and most obvious achievement of the younger poet is to have raised this kind of thing to a much higher power; to have kept the vividness of conversation where Wyatt too often had only the flatness; to sting like a lash where Wyatt merely grumbled. The difference in degree between the two poets thus obscures the similarity in kind. Donne has so far surpassed not only Wyatt but all the Elizabethans in what may be called their Wyatt moments, and has so generally abstained from attempting to rival them in their other vein, that we hardly think of him as continuing one side of their complex tradition; he appears rather as the innovator who substituted a realistic for a decorated kind of love poetry.
Now this error is not in itself important. In an age which was at all well placed for judging the comparative merits of the two styles, it would not matter though we thought that Donne had invented what in fact he only brought to perfection. But our own age is not so placed. The mellifluous style, which we may agree to call Petrarchan though no English poet is very like Petrarch, has really no chance of a fair hearing. It is based on a conception of poetry wholly different from that of the twentieth century. It descends from old Provençal and Italian sources and presupposes a poetic like that of Dante. Dante, we may remember, thinks of poetry as something to be made, to be ‘adorned as much as possible’, to have its ‘true sense’ hidden beneath a rich vesture of ‘rhetorical colouring’. The ‘Petrarchan’ sonneteers are not trying to make their work sound like the speaking voice. They are not trying to communicate faithfully the raw, the merely natural, impact of actual passion. The passion for them is not a specimen of ‘nature’ to be followed so much as a lump of ore to be refined: they ask themselves not ‘How can I record it with the least sophistication?’ but ‘Of its bones what coral can I make?’, and to accuse them of insincerity is like calling an oyster insincere because it makes its disease into a pearl. The aim of the other style is quite different. It wishes to be convincing, intimate, naturalistic. It would be very foolish to set up these two kinds of poetry as rivals, for obviously they are different and both are good. It is a fine thing to hear the living voice, the voice of a man like ourselves, whispering or shouting to us from the printed page with all the heat of life; and it is a fine thing, too, to see such life—so pitiably like our own, I doubt not, in the living—caught up and transfigured, sung by the voice of a god into an ecstasy no less real though in another dimension.* There is no necessary quarrel between the two. But there are many reasons why one of them should start with overwhelming odds in its favour at the present moment. For many years our poetics have been becoming more and more expressionistic. First came Wordsworth with his theory, and we have never quite worked it out of our system; even in the crude form that ‘you should write as you talk’, it works at the back of much contemporary criticism. Then came the final break-up of aristocracy and the consequent, and still increasing, distaste for arduous disciplines of sentiment—the wholesale acceptance of the merely and unredeemedly natural. Finally, the psychological school of criticism overthrew what was left of the old conception of a poem as a construction and set up instead the poem as ‘document’. In so far as we admire Donne for being our first great practitioner in one of the many possible kinds of lyric, we are on firm ground; but the conception of him as liberator, as one who substituted ‘real’ or ‘live’ or ‘sincere’ for ‘artificial’ or ‘conventional’ love lyric, begs all the questions and is simply a prejudice de siècle.
But of course when we have identified the Wyatt element in Donne, we have still a very imperfect notion of his manner. We have described ‘Busie old foole’4 and ‘I wonder by my troth’5 and ‘For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love’;6 but we have left out the cleaving remora, the triple soul, the stiff twin compasses, and a hundred other things that were not in Wyatt. There were indeed a great many things not in Wyatt, and his manly plainness can easily be over-praised—pauper videri Cinna vult et est pauper. If Donne had not reinforced the style with new attractions it would soon have died of very simplicity. An account of these reinforcements will give us a rough notion of the unhappily named ‘metaphysical’ manner.
The first of them is the multiplication of conceits—not conceits of any special ‘metaphysical’ type but conceits such as we find in all the Elizabethans. When Donne speaks of the morning coming from his mistress’s eyes, or tells how they wake him like the light of a taper, these fanciful hyperboles are not, in themselves, a novelty. But, side by side with these, we find, as his second characteristic, what may be called the difficult conceit. This is clearly a class which no two readers will fill up in quite the same way. An example of what I mean comes at the end of ‘The Sunne Rising’ where the sun is congratulated on the fact that the two lovers have shortened his task for him. Even the quickest reader will be checked, if only for an infinitesimal time, before he sees how and why the lovers have done this, and will experience a kind of astonished relief at the unexpected answer. The pleasure of the thing, which can be paralleled in other artistic devices, perhaps in rhyme itself, would seem to depend on recurrent tension and relaxation. In the third place, we have Donne’s characteristic choice of imagery. The Petrarchans (I will call them so for convenience) had relied for their images mainly on mythology and on natural objects. Donne uses both of these sparingly—though his sea that ‘Leaves embroider’d works upon the sand’7 is as fine an image from nature as I know—and taps new sources such as law, science, philosophy, and the commonplaces of urban life. It is this that has given the Metaphysicals their name and been much misunderstood. When Johnson said that they were resolved to show their learning he said truth in fact, for there is an element of pedantry, of dandyism, an odi profanos air, about Donne—the old printer’s address not to the readers but to the understanders is illuminating. But Johnson was none the less misleading. He encouraged the idea that the abstruse nature of some of Donne’s similes was poetically relevant for good or ill. In fact, of course, when we have once found out what Donne is talking about—that is, when Sir Herbert Grierson has told us—the learning of the poet becomes unimportant. The image will stand or fall like any other by its intrinsic merit—its power of conveying a meaning ‘more luminously and with a sensation of delight’. The matter is worth mentioning only because Donne’s reputation in this respect repels some humble readers and attracts some prigs. What is important for criticism is his avoidance of the obviously poetical image; whether the intractable which he is determined to poetize is fetched from Thomas Aquinas or from the London underworld, the method is essentially the same. Indeed it would be easy to exaggerate the amount of learned imagery in his poems and even the amount of his learning. He knows much, but he seems to know even more because his knowledge so seldom overlaps with our own; and some scraps of his learning, such as that of angelic consciousness or of the three souls in man, come rather too often—like the soldiers in a stage army, and with the same result. This choice of imagery is closely connected with the surprising and ingenious nature of the connexions which Donne makes between the image and the matter in hand, thus getting a double surprise. No one, in the first place, expects lovers to be compared to compasses; and no one, even granted the comparison, would guess in what respect they are going to be compared.
But all these characteristics, in their mere enumeration, are what Donne would have called a ‘ruinous anatomie’. They might all be used—indeed they all are used by Herbert—to produce a result very unlike Donne’s. What gives their peculiar character to most of the Songs and Sonets is that they are dramatic in the sense of being addresses to an imagined hearer in the heat of an imagined conversation, and usually addresses of a violently argumentative character. The majority of lyrics, even where nominally addressed to a god, a woman, or a friend, are meditations or introspective narratives. Thus Herbert’s ‘Throw away thy rod’8 is formally an apostrophe; in fact, it is a picture of Herbert’s own state of mind. But the majority of the Songs and Sonets, including some that are addressed to abstractions like Love, present the poet’s state of mind only indirectly and are ostensibly concerned with badgering, wheedling, convincing, or upbraiding an imagined hearer. No poet, not even Browning, buttonholes us or, as we say, ‘goes for’ us like Donne. There are, of course, exceptions. ‘Goe, and catch a falling starre’, though it is in the form of an address, has not this effect; and ‘Twicknam Garden’ or the ‘Nocturnall’ are in fact, as well as in pretension, soliloquies. These exceptions include some of Donne’s best work; and indeed, one of the errors of contemporary criticism, to my mind, is an insufficient distinction between Donne’s best and Donne’s most characteristic. But I do not at present wish to emphasize this. For the moment it is enough to notice that the majority of his love lyrics, and of the Elegies, are of the type I have described. And since they are, nearly always, in the form of arguments, since they attempt to extort something from us, they are poetry of an extremely exacting kind. This exacting quality, this urgency and pressure of the poet upon the reader in every line, seems to me to be the root both of Donne’s weakness and his strength. When the thing fails it exercises the same dreadful fascination that we feel in the grip of the worst kind of bore—the hot-eyed, unescapable kind. When it succeeds it produces a rare intensity in our enjoyment—which is what a modern critic meant (I fancy) when he claimed that Donne made all other poetry sound less ‘serious’. The point is worth investigation.
For, of course, in one sense these poems are not serious at all. Poem after poem consists of extravagant conceits woven into the preposterous semblance of an argument. The preposterousness is the point. Donne intends to take your breath away by the combined subtlety and impudence of the steps that lead to his conclusion. Any attempt to overlook Donne’s ‘wit’ in this sense, or to pretend that his rare excursions into the direct expression of passion are typical, is false criticism. The paradox, the surprise, are essential; if you are not enjoying these you are not enjoying what Donne intended. Thus ‘Womans Constancy’ is of no interest as a document of Donne’s ‘cynicism’—any fool can be promiscuously unchaste and any fool can say so. The merit of the poem consists in the skill with which it leads us to expect a certain conclusion and then gives us precisely the opposite conclusion, and that, too, with an appearance of reasonableness. Thus, again, the art of ‘The Will’ consists in keeping us guessing through each stanza what universal in the concluding triplet will bind together the odd particulars in the preceding six lines. The test case is ‘The Flea’. If you think this very different from Donne’s other poems you may be sure that you have no taste for the real Donne. But for the accident that modern cleanliness by rendering this insect disgusting has also rendered it comic, the conceit is exactly on the same level as that of the tears in ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’.
And yet the modern critic was right. The effect of all these poems is somehow serious. ‘Serious’ indeed is the only word. Seldom profound in thought, not always passionate in feeling, they are none the less the very opposite of gay. It is as though Donne performed in deepest depression those gymnastics which are usually a sign of intellectual high spirits. He himself speaks of his ‘concupiscence of witt’.9 The hot, dark word is well chosen. We are all familiar—at least if we have lived in Ireland—with the type of mind which combines furious anger with a revelling delight in eloquence, nay grows more rhetorical as anger increases. In the same way, wit and the delight in wit are, for Donne, not only compatible with, but actually provoked by, the most uneasy passions—by contempt and self-contempt and unconvinced sensuality. His wit is not so much the play as the irritability of intellect. But none the less, like the angry Irishman’s clausulae, it is still enjoyed and still intends to produce admiration; and if we do not hold our breaths as we read, wondering in the middle of each complication how he will resolve it, and exclaiming at the end ‘How ever did you think of that?’ (Carew speaks of his ‘fresh invention’), we are not enjoying Donne.
Now this kind of thing can produce a very strong and a very peculiar pleasure. Our age has nothing to repent of in having learned to relish it. If the Augustans, in their love for the obviously poetical and harmonious, were blind to its merits, so much the worse for them. At the same time it is desirable not to overlook the special congeniality of such poetry to the twentieth century, and to beware of giving to this highly specialized and, in truth, very limited kind of excellence, a place in our scheme of literary values which it does not deserve. Donne’s rejection of the obviously poetical image was a good method—for Donne; but if we think that there is some intrinsic superiority in this method, so that all poetry about pylons and non obstantes must needs be of a higher order than poetry about lawns and lips and breasts and orient skies, we are deceived—deceived by the fact that we, like Donne, happen to live at the end of a great period of rich and nobly obvious poetry. It is natural to want your savoury after your sweets; but you must not base a philosophy of cookery on that momentary preference. Again, Donne’s obscurity and occasional abstruseness have sometimes (not always) produced magnificent results, and we do well to praise them. But, as I have hinted, an element of dandyism was present in Donne himself—he ‘would have no such readers as he could teach’—and we must be very cautious here lest shallow call to shallow. There is a great deal of dandyism (largely of Franco-American importation) in the modern literary world. And finally, what shall we say of Donne’s ‘seriousness’, of that persistency, that nimiety, that astringent quality (as Boehme would have said) which makes him, if not the saddest, at least the most uncomfortable, of our poets? Here, surely, we find the clearest and most disturbing congeniality of all. It would be foolish not to recognize the growth in our criticism of something that I can only describe as literary Manichaeism—a dislike of peace and pleasure and heartsease simply as such. To be bilious is, in some circles, almost the first qualification for a place in the Temple of Fame.* We distrust the pleasures of imagination, however hotly and unmerrily we preach the pleasures of the body. This seriousness must not be confused with profundity. We do not like poetry that essays to be wise, and Chaucer would think we had rejected ‘doctryne’ and ‘solas’ about equally. We want, in fact, just what Donne can give us—something stern and tough, though not necessarily virtuous, something that does not conciliate. Born under Saturn, we do well to confess the liking complexionally forced upon us; but not to attempt that wisdom which dominates the stars is pusillanimous, and to set up our limitation as a norm—to believe, against all experience, in a Saturnocentric universe—is folly.
Before leaving the discussion of Donne’s manner I must touch, however reluctantly, on a charge that has been brought against him from the time of Ben Jonson till now. Should he, or should he not, be hanged for not keeping the accent? There is more than one reason why I do not wish to treat this subject. In the first place, the whole nature of Donne’s stanza, and of what he does within the stanza, cannot be profitably discussed except by one who knows much more than I do about the musical history of the time. ‘Confined Love’, for example, is metrically meaningless without the tune. But I could make shift with that difficulty: my real trouble is of quite a different kind. In discussing Donne’s present popularity, the question of metre forces me to a statement which I do not make without embarrassment. Some one must say it, but I do not care for the office, for what I have to say will hardly be believed among scholars and hardly listened to by any one else. It is simply this—that the opinions of the modern world on the metre of any poet are, in general, of no value at all, because most modern readers of poetry do not know how to scan. My evidence for this amazing charge is twofold. In the first place I find that very many of my own pupils—some of them from excellent schools, most of them great readers of poetry, not a few of them talented and (for their years) well-informed persons—are quite unable, when they first come to me, to find out from the verse how Marlowe pronounced Barabas or Mahomet. To be sure, if challenged, they will say that they do not believe in syllable-counting or that the old methods of scansion have been exploded, but this is only a smoke screen. It is easy to find out that they have not got beyond the traditional legal fiction of longs and shorts and have never even got so far: they are in virgin ignorance. And my experience as an examiner shows me that this is not peculiar to my own pupils. My second piece of evidence is more remarkable. I have heard a celebrated belle-lettrist—a printed critic and poet—repeatedly, in the same lecture, so mispronounce the name of a familiar English poem as to show that he did not know a decasyllabic line when he met it. The conclusion is unavoidable. Donne may be metrically good or bad, in fact; but it is obvious that he might be bad to any degree without offending the great body of his modern admirers. On that side, his present vogue is worth precisely nothing. No doubt this widespread metrical ignorance is itself a symptom of some deeper change; and I am far from suggesting that the appearance of vers libre is simply a result of the ignorance. More probably the ignorance, and the deliberate abandonment, of accentual metres are correlative phenomena, and both the results of some revolution in our whole sense of rhythm—a revolution of great importance reaching deep down into the unconscious and even perhaps into the blood. But that is not our business at the moment.
The sentiment of Donne’s love poems is easier to describe than their manner, and its charm for modern readers easier to explain. No one will deny that the twentieth century, so far, has shown an extraordinary interest in the sexual appetite and has been generally marked by a reaction from the romantic idealization of that appetite. We have agreed with the romantics in regarding sexual love as a subject of overwhelming importance, but hardly in anything else. On the purely literary side we are wearied with the floods of uxorious bathos which the romantic conception undoubtedly liberated. As psychologists we are interested in the new discovery of the secreter and less reputable operations of the instinct. As practical philosophers we are living in an age of sexual experiment. The whole subject offers us an admirable field for the kind of seriousness I have just described. It seems odd, at first sight, that a sixteenth-century poet should give us so exactly what we want; but it can be explained.
The great central movement of love poetry, and of fiction about love, in Donne’s time is that represented by Shakespeare and Spenser. This movement consisted in the final transmutation of the medieval courtly love or romance of adultery into an equally romantic love that looked to marriage as its natural conclusion. The process, of course, had begun far earlier—as early, indeed, as the Kingis Quair—but its triumph belongs to the sixteenth century. It is most powerfully expressed by Spenser, but more clearly and philosophically by Chapman in that under-estimated poem, his Hero and Leander. These poets were engaged, as Professor Vinaver would say, in reconciling Carbonek and Camelot, virtue and courtesy, divine and human love; and incidentally in laying down the lines which love poetry was to follow till the nineteenth century. We who live at the end of the dispensation which they inaugurated and in reaction against it are not well placed for evaluating their work. Precisely what is revolutionary and creative in it seems to us platitudinous, orthodox, and stale. If there were a poet, and a strong poet, alive in their time who was failing to move with them, he would inevitably appear to us more ‘modern’ than they.
But was Donne such a poet? A great critic has assigned him an almost opposite rôle, and it behoves us to proceed with caution. It may be admitted at once that Donne’s work is not, in this respect, all of a piece; no poet fits perfectly into such a scheme as I have outlined—it can be true only by round and by large. There are poems in which Donne attempts to sing a love perfectly in harmony with the moral law, but they are not very numerous and I do not think they are usually his best pieces. Donne never for long gets rid of a medieval sense of the sinfulness of sexuality; indeed, just because the old conventional division between Carbonek and Camelot is breaking up, he feels this more continuously and restively than any poet of the Middle Ages.
Donne was bred a Roman Catholic. The significance of this in relation to his learned and scholastic imagery can be exaggerated; scraps of Calvin, or, for that matter, of Euclid or Bacon, might have much the same poetical effect as his scraps of Aquinas. But it is all-important for his treatment of love. This is not easily understood by the modern reader, for later-day conceptions of the Puritan and the Roman Catholic stand in the way. We have come to use the word ‘Puritan’ to mean what should rather be called ‘rigorist’ or ‘ascetic’, and we tend to assume that the sixteenth-century Puritans were ‘puritanical’ in this sense. Calvin’s rigorist theocracy at Geneva lends colour to the error. But there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally. On the contrary, More thought of a Puritan as one who ‘loued no lenton fast, nor lightlye no faste elles, sauing brekefast, and eate fast, and drinke fast, and slepe fast, and luske fast in their lechery’10—a person only too likely to end up in the ‘abominable heresies’ of the Anabaptists about communism of goods and wives. And Puritan theology, so far from being grim and gloomy, seemed to More to err in the direction of fantastic optimism. ‘I covld for my parte’, he writes, ‘be very wel content, that sinne and payn and all were as shortly gone as Tindall telleth vs. But I were loth that he deceued vs if it be not so.’11 More would not have understood the idea, sometimes found in the modern writers, that he and his friends were defending a ‘merry’ Catholic England against sour precisions; they were rather defending necessary severity and sternly realistic theology against wanton labefaction—penance and ‘works’ and vows of celibacy and mortification and Purgatory against the easy doctrine, the mere wish-fulfilment dream, of salvation by faith. Hence when we turn from the religious works of More to Luther’s Table Talk we are at once struck by the geniality of the latter. If Luther is right, we have waked from nightmare into sunshine: if he is wrong, we have entered a fools’ paradise. The burden of his charge against the Catholics is that they have needlessly tormented us with scruples; and, in particular, that ‘antichrist will regard neither God nor the love of women’.12 ‘On what pretence have they forbidden us marriage? ’Tis as though we were forbidden to eat, to drink, to sleep.’13 ‘Where women are not honoured, temporal and domestic government are despised.’14 He praises women repeatedly: More, it will be remembered, though apparently an excellent husband and father, hardly ever mentions a woman save to ridicule her. It is easy to see why Luther’s marriage (as he called it) or Luther’s ‘abominable bichery’15 (if you prefer) became almost a symbol. More can never keep off the subject for more than a few pages.
This antithesis, if once understood, explains many things in the history of sentiment, and many differences, noticeable to the present day, between the Protestant and the Catholic parts of Europe. It explains why the conversion of courtly love into romantic monogamous love was so largely the work of English, and even of Puritan, poets; and it goes far to explain why Donne contributes so little to that movement.
I trace in his poetry three levels of sentiment. On the lowest level (lowest, that is, in order of complexity), we have the celebration of simple appetite, as in ‘Elegy XIX’. If I call this a pornographic poem, I must be understood to use that ugly word as a descriptive, not a dyslogistic, term. I mean by it that this poem, in my opinion, is intended to arouse the appetite it describes, to affect not only the imagination but the nervous system of the reader.* And I may as well say at once—but who would willingly claim to be a judge in such matters?—that it seems to me to be very nearly perfect in its kind. Nor would I call it an immoral poem. Under what conditions the reading of it could be an innocent act is a real moral question; but the poem itself contains nothing intrinsically evil.
On the highest, or what Donne supposed to be the highest, level we have the poems of ostentatiously virtuous love, ‘The Undertaking’, ‘A Valediction: forbidding Mourning’, and ‘The Extasie’. It is here that the contrast between Donne and his happier contemporaries is most marked. He is trying to follow them into the new age, to be at once passionate and innocent; and if any reader will make the experiment of imagining Beatrice or Juliet or Perdita, or again, Amoret or Britomart, or even Philoclea or Pamela, as the auditress throughout these poems, he will quickly feel that something is wrong. You may deny, as perhaps some do, that the romantic conception of ‘pure’ passion has any meaning; but certainly, if there is such a thing, it is not like this. It does not prove itself pure by talking about purity. It does not keep on drawing distinctions between spirit and flesh to the detriment of the latter and then explaining why the flesh is, after all, to be used. This is what Donne does, and the result is singularly unpleasant. The more he labours the deeper ‘Dun is in the mire’, and it is quite arguable that ‘The Extasie’ is a much nastier poem than the nineteenth ‘Elegy’. What any sensible woman would make of such a wooing it is difficult to imagine—or would be difficult if we forgot the amazing protective faculty which each sex possesses of not listening to the other.
Between these two extremes falls the great body of Donne’s love poetry. In certain obvious, but superficial, respects, it continues the medieval tradition. Love is still a god and lovers his ‘clergie’;16 oaths may be made in ‘reverentiall feare’ of his ‘wrath’;17 and the man who resists him is ‘rebell and atheist’.18 Donne can even doubt, like Soredamors, whether those who admit Love after a struggle have not forfeited his grace by their resistance, like
Small townes which stand stiffle, till great shot
Enforce them.19
He can personify the attributes of his mistress, the ‘enormous Gyant’ her Disdain and the ‘enchantresse Honor’,20 quite in the manner of The Romance of the Rose. He writes albas for both sexes, and in the Holy Sonets repents of his love poetry, writing his palinode, in true medieval fashion. A reader may wonder, at first, why the total effect is so foreign to the Middle Ages: but Donne himself has explained this when he says, speaking of the god of Love,
If he wroung from mee’a teare, I brin’d it so
With scorne or shame, that him it nourish’d not.21
This admirable couplet not only tells us, in brief, what Donne has effected but shows us that he knew what he was doing. It does not, of course, cover every single poem. A few pieces admittedly express delighted love and they are among Donne’s most popular works; such are ‘The Good-morrow’ and ‘The Anniversarie’—poems that again remind us of the difference between his best and his typical. But the majority of the poems ring the changes on five themes, all of them grim ones—on the sorrow of parting (including death), the miseries of secrecy, the falseness of the mistress, the fickleness of Donne, and finally on contempt for love itself. The poems of parting stand next to the poems of happy love in general popularity and are often extremely affecting. We may hear little of the delights of Donne’s loves, and dislike what we hear of their ‘purity’; the pains ring true. The song ‘Sweetest love, I do not goe’ is remarkable for its broken, but haunting, melody, and nowhere else has Donne fused argument, conceit, and classical imitation into a more perfect unity. ‘A Feaver’ is equally remarkable, and that for a merit very rare in Donne—its inevitability. It is a single jet of music and feeling, a straight flight without appearance of effort. The remaining four of our five themes are all various articulations of the ‘scorne or shame’ with which Donne ‘brines’ his reluctantly extorted tributes to the god of Love; monuments, unparalleled outside Catullus, to the close kinship between certain kinds of love and certain kinds of hate. The faithlessness of women is sometimes treated, in a sense, playfully; but there is always something—the clever surprise in ‘Womans Constancy’ or the grotesque in ‘Goe, and catche a falling starre’—which stops these poems short of a true anacreontic gaiety. The theme of faithlessness rouses Donne to a more characteristic, and also a better, poetry in such a hymn of hate as ‘The Apparition’, or in the sad mingling of fear, contempt, and self-contempt in ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’. The pains of secrecy give opportunity for equally fierce and turbulent writing. I may be deceived when I find in the sixteenth Elegy, along with many other nauseas and indignations, a sickened male contempt for the whole female world of nurses and ‘midnights startings’22 and hysterics; but ‘The Curse’ is unambiguous. The ending here is particularly delicious just because the main theme—an attack on Jealosie or the ‘lozengiers’—is so medieval and so associated with the ‘honour of love’. Of the poet’s own fickleness one might expect, at last, a merry treatment; and perhaps in ‘The Indifferent’ we get it. But I am not sure. Even this seems to have a sting in it. And of ‘Loves Usury’ what shall I say? The struggle between lust and reason, the struggle between love and reason, these we know; but Donne is perhaps the first poet who has ever painted lust holding love at arm’s length, in the hope ‘that there’s no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet’—and all this only as an introduction to the crowning paradox that in old age even a reciprocated love must be endured. The poem is, in its way, a masterpiece, and a powerful indirect expression of Donne’s habitual ‘shame and scorne’. For, in the long run, it must be admitted that ‘the love of hatred and the hate of love’ is the main, though not the only, theme of the Songs and Sonets. A man is a fool for loving and a double fool for saying so in ‘whining poetry’; the only excuse is that the sheer difficulty of drawing one’s pains through rhyme’s vexation ‘allays’ them. A woman’s love at best will be only the ‘spheare’ of a man’s—inferior to it as the heavenly spheres are to their intelligences or air to angels. Love is a spider that can transubstantiate all sweets into bitter: a devil who differs from his fellow devils at court by taking the soul and giving nothing in exchange. The mystery which the Petrarchans or their medieval predecessors made of it is ‘imposture all’, like the claims of alchemists. It is a very simple matter (foeda et brevis voluptas), and all it comes to in the end is
that my man,
Can be as happy’as I can.23
Unsuccessful love is a plague and tyranny; but there is a plague even worse—Love might try
A deeper plague, to make her love mee too!24
Love enjoyed is like gingerbread with the gilt off. What pleased the whole man now pleases one sense only—
And that so lamely, as it leaves behinde
A kinde of sorrowing dulnesse to the minde.25
The doctors say it shortens life.
It may be urged that this is an unfair selection of quotations, or even that I have arrived at my picture of Donne by leaving out all his best poems, for one reason or another, as ‘exceptions’, and then describing what remains. There is one sense in which I admit this. Any account of Donne which concentrates on his love poetry must be unfair to the poet, for it leaves out much of his best work. By hypothesis, it must neglect the dazzling sublimity of his best religious poems, the grotesque charm of The Progresse of the Soule, and those scattered, but exquisite, patches of poetry that appear from time to time amidst the insanity of The First and Second Anniversaries. Even in the Epistles there are good passages. But as far as concerns his love poetry, I believe I am just. I have no wish to rule out the exceptions, provided that they are admitted to be exceptions. I am attempting to describe the prevailing tone of his work, and in my description no judgement is yet implied.
To Judgement let us now proceed. Here is a collection of verse describing with unusual and disturbing energy the torments of a mind which has been baffled in its relation to sexual love by certain temporary and highly special conditions. What is its value? To admit the ‘unusual and disturbing energy’ is, of course, to admit that Donne is a poet; he has, in the modern phrase, ‘put his stuff across’. Those who believe that criticism can separate inquiry into the success of communication from that into the value of the thing communicated will demand that we should now proceed to evaluate the ‘stuff’; and if we do so, it would not be hard to point out how transitory and limited and, as it were, accidental the appeal of such ‘stuff’ must be. But something of the real problem escapes under this treatment. It would not be impossible to imagine a poet dealing with this same stuff, marginal and precarious as it is, in a way that would permanently engage our attention. Donne’s real limitation is not that he writes about, but that he writes in, a chaos of violent and transitory passions. He is perpetually excited and therefore perpetually cut off from the deeper and more permanent springs of his own excitement. But how is this to be separated from his technique—the nagging, nudging, quibbling stridency of his manner? If a man writes thus, what can he communicate but excitement? Or again, if he finds nothing but excitement to communicate, how else should he write? It is impossible here to distinguish cause from effect. Our concern, in the long run, must be with the actual poetry (the ‘stuff’ thus communicated, this communication of such ‘stuff’) and with the question how far that total phenomenon is calculated to interest human imagination. And to this question I can see only one answer: that its interest, save for a mind specially predisposed in its favour, must be short-lived and superficial, though intense. Paradoxical as it may seem, Donne’s poetry is too simple to satisfy. Its complexity is all on the surface—an intellectual and fully conscious complexity that we soon come to the end of. Beneath this we find nothing but a limited series of ‘passions’—explicit, mutually exclusive passions which can be instantly and adequately labelled as such—things which can be readily talked about, and indeed, must be talked about because, in silence, they begin to lose their hard outlines and overlap, to betray themselves as partly fictitious. That is why Donne is always arguing. There are puzzles in his work, but we can solve them all if we are clever enough; there is none of the depth and ambiguity of real experience in him, such as underlies the apparent simplicity of How sleep the brave or Songs of Innocence, or even Aἰαῖ ΛєιΨύδριον.* The same is true, for the most part, of the specifically ‘metaphysical’ comparisons. One idea has been put into each and nothing more can come out of it. Hence they tend to die on our hands, where some seemingly banal comparison of a woman to a flower or God’s anger to flame can touch us at innumerable levels and renew its virginity at every reading. Of all literary virtues ‘originality’, in the vulgar sense, has, for this reason, the shortest life. When we have once mastered a poem by Donne there is nothing more to do with it. To use his own simile, he deals in earthquakes, not in that ‘trepidation of the spheares’ which is so much less violent but ‘greater far’.26
Some, of course, will contend that his love poems should interest me permanently because of their ‘truth’. They will say that he has shown me passion with the mask off, and catch at my word ‘uncomfortable’ to prove that I am running away from him because he tells me more truth than I can bear. But this is the mere frenzy of anti-romanticism. Of course, Donne is true in the sense that passions such as he presents do occur in human experience. So do a great many other things. He makes his own selection, like Dickens, or Gower, or Herrick, and his world is neither more nor less ‘real’ than theirs; while it is obviously less real than the world of Homer, or Virgil, or Tolstoy. In one way, indeed, Donne’s love poetry is less true than that of the Petrarchans, in so far as it largely omits the very thing that all the pother is about. Donne shows us a variety of sorrows, scorns, angers, disgusts, and the like which arise out of love. But if any one asked ‘What is all this about? What is the attraction which makes these partings so sorrowful? What is the peculiarity about this physical pleasure which he speaks of so contemptuously, and how has it got tangled up with such a storm of emotions?’, I do not know how we could reply except by pointing to some ordinary love poetry. The feeblest sonnet, almost, of the other school would give us an answer with coral lips and Cupid’s golden wings and the opening rose, with perfumes and instruments of music, with some attempt, however trite, to paint that iridescence which explains why people write poems about love at all. In this sense Donne’s love poetry is parasitic. I do not use this word as a term of reproach; there are so many good poets, by now, in the world that one particular poet is entitled to take for granted the depth of a passion and deal with its froth. But as a purely descriptive term, ‘parasitic’ seems to me true. Donne’s love poems could not exist unless love poems of a more genial character existed first. He shows us amazing shadows cast by love upon the intellect, the passions, and the appetite; to learn of the substance which casts them we must go to other poets, more balanced, more magnanimous, and more humane. There are, I well remember, poems (some two or three) in which Donne himself presents the substance; and the fact that he does so without much luxury of language and symbol endears them to our temporarily austere taste. But in the main, his love poetry is Hamlet without the prince.
Donne’s influence on the poets of the seventeenth century is a commonplace of criticism. Of that influence at its best, as it is seen in the great devotional poetry of the period, I have not now to speak. In love poetry he was not, perhaps, so dominant. His nequitiae probably encouraged the cynical and licentious songs of his successors, but, if so, the imitation is very different from the model. Suckling’s impudence, at its best, is light-hearted and very unlike the ferocity of Donne; and Suckling’s chief fault in this vein—a stolid fleshliness which sometimes leads him to speak of his mistress’s body more like a butcher than a lecher—is entirely his own. The more strictly metaphysical elements in Donne are, of course, lavishly reproduced; but I doubt if the reproduction succeeds best when it is most faithful. Thus Carew’s stanzas ‘When thou, poor Excommunicate’ or Lovelace’s ‘To Lucasta, Going beyond the Seas’ are built up on Donne’s favourite plan, but both, as it seems to me, fail in that startling and energetic quality which this kind of thing demands. They have no edge. When these poets succeed it is by adding something else to what they have learned from Donne—in fact by reuniting Donne’s manner with something much more like ordinary poetry. Beauty (like cheerfulness) is always breaking in. Thus the conceit of asking where various evanescent, beautiful phenomena go when they vanish and replying that they are all to be found in one’s mistress is the sort of conceit that Donne might have used; and, starting from that end, we could easily work it up into something tolerably like bad Donne. As thus:
Oh fooles that aske whether of odours burn’d
The seminall forme live, and from that death
Conjure the same with chymique arte—’tis turn’d
To that quintessence call’d her Breath!
But if we use the same idea as Carew uses it we get a wholly different effect:
Aske me no more where Jove bestowes,
When June is past, the fading rose:
For in your beauties orient deepe,
These flowers as in their causes, sleepe.27
The idea is the same. But the choices of the obvious and obviously beautiful rose, instead of the recondite seminal form of vegetables, the great regal name of Jove, the alliteration, the stately voluptuousness of a quatrain where all the accented syllables are also long in quantity (a secret little known)—all this smothers the sharpness of thought in sweetness. Compared with Donne, it is almost soporific; compared with it, Donne is shrill. But the conceit is there; and ‘as in their causes, sleepe’ which looks at first like a blunder, is in fact a paradox that Donne might have envied. So again, the conceit that the lady’s hair outshines the sun, though not much more than an Elizabethan conceit, might well have appeared in the Songs and Sonets; but Donne would neither have wished, nor been able, to attain the radiance of Lovelace’s
But shake your head and scatter day!28
This process of enchanting, or, in Shakespeare’s sense, ‘translating’ Donne was carried to its furthest point by Marvell. Almost every element of Donne—except his metrical roughness—appears in the ‘Coy Mistress’. Nothing could be more like Donne, both in the grimness of its content and in its impudently argumentative function, than the conceit that
worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity.29
All the more admirable is the art by which this, and everything else in that poem, however abstruse, dismaying, or sophistical, is subordinated to a sort of golden tranquillity. What was death to Donne is mere play to Marvell. ‘Out of the strong’, we are tempted to say, ‘has come sweetness’, but in reality the strength is all on Marvell’s side. He is an Olympian, ruling at ease for his own good purposes, all that intellectual and passionate mobility of which Donne was the slave, and leading Donne himself, bound, behind his chariot.
From all this we may conclude that Donne was a ‘good influence’—a better influence than many greater poets. It would hardly be too much to say that the final cause of Donne’s poetry is the poetry of Herbert, Crashaw, and Marvell; for the very qualities which make Donne’s kind of poetry unsatisfying poetic food make it a valuable ingredient.30